A record number of people came to celebrate Amoeba Hollywood’s annual Fat Tuesday celebration. This year saw The Dirty Dozen Brass Band perform live and lead the annual Second Line Parade down the aisles of Amoeba.
The band brought New Orleans cheer to the store, getting the family-friendly audience dancing in the aisles with their influential funk-infused jazz style. Some attendees showed up in Mardi Gras costume, including a quartet of girls in white dresses spattered with fake blood — maybe it’s a True Blood thing, I’m not sure.
While homemade floats, masks and beads floated around the audience, the extraordinary musicianship on display wasn’t lost on the audience. A sax solo introduced the band’s second song, breaking out into a drum solo before returning to the song and drawing huge applause. They got the audience clapping to what I thought was a standup bass but was actually DDBB’s tuba player playing a rubbery bassline. They thanked the audience and Amoeba as they capped off 36 years as a band before leading everyone through a parade while playing “When the Saints Go Marching In” up and down the aisles.
Amoeba is distributing The Congo Square Project Foundation: Sacred Ground Vols. 1 and 2, the first two of six planned volumes tracing the development of New Orleans music, with all proceeds of the sale benefiting New Orleans relief efforts. Additionally, a portion of all proceeds for the day (including sales on Amoeba.com) went to Tipitina’s Foundation, which seeks to preserve Louisiana and New Orleans’ musical heritage, and New Orleans Musicians’ Clinic, which is dedicated to providing affordable healthcare to New Orleans musicians. A total of $3,000 was donated from Amoeba's revenue Feb. 12, adding to the $1,400 raised through a charity auction held at Amoeba Hollywood Feb. 2 ($700 was raised from auction sales, with a $700 match from Amoeba), for a combined total of $4,400 sent to the two charities.
As outlined in the previous pre Fat Tuesday preview /
Washboard Chaz play his rendition of this Black gospel plantation classic singing, "I ain't go study war no more, study war no more, ain't go study oh war no more. Gonna lay down my sword and shield. Down by the riverside…" To Fabian these lyrics, sung by a Woody Guthrie type traditionalist, seemed perfectly in tune with the current political/economic climate. "I immediately invited him to come on-board the project," said Fabian, quickly noting how, "[I] wished politicians could learn to sing that wise song too!" 
It may now be eight years since Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans and the Gulf Coast but that does not mean that Amoeba Music has in any way abandoned its continued commitment to doing its bit in the still much needed recovery and rebuilding in the area. On the contrary; we've up the ante, and so this Fat Tuesday (Feb 12th) 
In what might be dubbed the Big Bang Theory of Jazz, the world began in April 1923 when King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band with Louis Armstrong in tow stepped into the Gennett Recording studio and cut nine sides. The Oliver band had been knocking 'em dead for several months in nearby Chicago at the cavernous South Side dance hall Lincoln Gardens, and these recordings would become the gold standard for early New Orleans jazz. Even more significant for the future of jazz, although Louis would play his first recorded solos on these sessions, he would soon outgrow the limited space for him in such ensembles of collective improvisation. He just wanted to cut loose and blow, and as people heard him and his fame grew, he would evolve into the first star of jazz and almost single-handedly transform jazz from a dance music to that of improvising solo performance.
When I first started collecting 78s, I avoided early “pre-electric” discs because the sound was a bit distant and thin compared to the electric process, which was still a few years off in the future, and I passed up many of these 1923 King Oliver Gennetts. Now I look back on my screwed up priorities and feel it was akin to throwing away a hundred dollar bill because it was too wrinkled. Musically, if not sonically, these early King Oliver Gennetts still hold up as some of the most exuberant discs ever recorded. Every player attacked the thread of melody at once, each adding fuel to the fire without getting in each other's way – never mind that you're not a jazz fan, and don't confuse these recordings with later derivative white revival “dixieland” (or “dorksieland” as some of my friends call it). Early jazz was first and foremost dance music, the rock 'n' roll of its day, and New Orleans style was loud, brash, rock solid dance music, activating hormones and posing the same kind of threat to middle America that rock 'n' roll would in the 1950s. Check out this1925 headline from a Cincinnati newspaper zeroing in on the insidious influence of jazz.
